Openings
In April 2015, Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-profit organization advocating foreign workers’ rights in Singapore, released a controversial video entitled “Mums and Maids” as part of their # igivedayoff campaign for foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in the island-state. The advocacy video shows side-by-side interviews of mothers and their domestic workers as each of them was asked one intimate detail about their child or ward before cutting into the children’s actual responses. It was the helpers who got the answers right. The ad ends with a note: “Let’s give domestic workers their legal days off” (TWC2 and Ogilvy and Maher Co. 2015). The video became viral, spurring thousands of views and shares among Singaporean netizens and stirring conversation in social media. Many of the positive reactions confessed how touched they were by this simple yet affecting depiction of the irony of employing a live-in maid in Singapore and also probably elsewhere in the world. Mothers are slowly becoming distant from their own children as the children become closer to the hired help.
However, TWC2’s message also backfired as others felt that in its attempt to promote domestic workers’ right, the campaign had also shamed working mothers. These criticisms came from the video’s powerful yet problematic subtext that rests upon assumptions that domestic and care work is solely the woman’s responsibility and the threat of the kids growing closer to the maids justifies the need to give them day-off, not because it is their fundamental right as workers. The problems and responses raised by this two-minute clip demonstrate how the subjective realm of emotions and feelings often inform and arbitrate the ways in which the objective norms of rights and laws are understood and expressed in public discourse, especially in this line of work that is considered gendered and very intimate.
Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are able to enter the most intimate spaces of their host even though they are largely excluded by laws and social practices from fully integrating into the receiving countries. Inside these foreign households, however, migrant women form emotional ties with their employing families to circumvent the effects of isolation and social exclusion. The intimacies they create to find a sense of belonging in foreign homes and foreign cities can also serve to intimidate the hosts that welcome and accommodate them. This shows how the emotional lives of migrant women and the personal ties they form intervene into and complicate issues of social exclusion and belonging for FDWs.
Through the critical conversations on hospitality and the debate of social inclusion and exclusion, I examine how both Hong Kong and Singapore, as host city-states, structure and practice their varying versions of calculated hospitality. In this section, I discuss how the practice of receiving and accommodating FDWs in both territories deploys ideas of social exclusion even and especially in the realm of intimate labor in discourses of citizenship, residency (and lack of thereof), and its policy of inviting and classifying foreigners according to the host state’s cost-benefit calculations. Then I proceed to discuss its consequences by looking at the particularities of each of these city-states’ policies and the kinds of contradictions their practices of limited hospitality structure in migrant helpers’ living and working conditions.
The paradox of intimacy and exclusion that frames the problem of hospitality in the discourse of transnational care and domestic work is evident in the visual and literary texts of and on migrant Filipina and Indonesian women in Singapore and Hong Kong. Anthony Chen’s (2013) Ilo Ilo and Oliver Siu-Kuen Chan’s (2018) Still Human cinematically portray how Filipina helpers straddle between the impulse to be intimate with their employers while being perennially kept out by their hosts, on the one hand, and the incongruous and paradoxical way Hong Kong and Singaporean employers feel about their guest workers, on the other. These two melodramas of finding intimacy inside a foreign household also expose how the problematic meanings impinged on domestic work as intimate labor support and sustain the exclusionary policies and practices towards FDWs in host societies.
Migrant Filipina and Indonesian women’s own cultural productions productively interrogate these two middle-class directors’ filmic representations of this inherent intimacy and exclusion shaping FDWs’ presence and labor in transnational households. Cultural texts written and produced from the perspective and lens of Indonesian and Filipina migrant women—like Susie Utomo’s (2020) short story, “Penjajah di Rumahku” [Intruder at Home], and the black-and-white photographs of Xyza Cruz Bacani (2018) in her art book We Are Like Air—present nuanced counter-narratives to the two films in portraying simultaneous gestures of inclusion and exclusion in accommodating guest workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. These literary and visual texts not only contribute to the ongoing discussions on the limits of hospitality and the problems of social exclusion but also open up new imaginaries of belonging by portraying the inner worlds of helpers and their employers and representing the many ways intimacy and intimate labor transform the politics of welcome in foreign households in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Necessary but Invisible Labor
FDWs are placed at the nexus of complex global processes, where they inhabit “the regime of labor intimacy”: a commodified sphere of intimate and private labor in the service of capitalist hyperdevelopment in many global cities (Chang and Lin 2005, 30). The economic boom experienced by both Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1980s has led to a neoliberal restructuring that has enjoined their citizens, including middle-class women, who were traditionally burdened with domestic work, to participate in formal economies and industries (Huang and Yeoh 1998). This industrialization process has not only absorbed the middle-class women who previously carried out unpaid domestic obligations but has also resulted in the dwindling number of women who were previously involved in paid household work (Chinese amahs and women from rural areas) (Gaw 1988). This setup has engendered both the island-states’ intervention in solving such a domestic problem by outsourcing women from poorer neighbors in South and Southeast Asia, formalizing domestic work as part of both the global cities’ needs to encourage continued participation of women in the formal economies, without sacrificing the reproductive sphere of both states (Chan 2005).
Migrant household workers’ role is necessary for the economic and social life of Singapore and Hong Kong as they enable skill upgrade and professionalization of local women while stabilizing birth and marriage rates of these city-states. However, their insertion into the intimate lives of the receiving states’ middle-class households is largely seen as undesired. The prevalence of racial and classist stereotypes on foreign maids—seen, for example, in the popular use of the condescending Cantonese term banmui (Philippine girl) or “brownfacing” Chinese actors to represent Filipina domestics in TV commercials—reveals how locals perceive their inferior status as both workers and foreigners in these cities (Constable 1997, 77; Choi and Agence France-Presse 2014). These racist and classist ideas support certain practices of social exclusion, like barring FDWs access to certain establishments or the day-to-day derogatory treatment in certain places in the host countries (Grundy 2013).
These expressions of racism and classism, however, are conditioned by the kind of hospitality that both destination states extend to guest workers. Hong Kong and Singapore invite and welcome predominantly brown-skinned women of poorer countries of South and Southeast Asia because they are both cheaper and ethnically different to their hosts. Filipina and Indonesian women are preferable because they are less expensive and they are easily distinguishable from the mostly fairer Chinese middle-class households that hire them (Wee and Sim 2005). This means that racial profiling is fundamental in this mode of hospitality, where migrant maids’ skin color and physical attributes serve as “racial boundaries” that mark her difference from, despite her proximity to, her employers (Lan 2006). Invited by the host country out of necessity, but largely excluded because of their perceived status and stereotypes, their needed but unwanted presence in these Asian hubs challenges and undermines the drummed up virtues of economic integration and social inclusiveness that both Hong Kong and Singapore project as cosmopolitan cities (Yeoh 2004, Law 2002).
Social Exclusion
Pheng Cheah (2010), in “Necessary Strangers: Law’s Hospitality in the Age of Transnational Migrancy,” describes the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of FDWs in these city-states as a form of “calculated hospitality.” The contemporary practices and discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism have only exacerbated “the tension between the attraction and repulsion of the stranger” (35), which is especially salient in Hong Kong and Singapore, where “the project of cultivating human capital on which these host cities’ hyperdevelopment has been based is governed by a discourse of hospitality based on cost-benefit calculations” (37). In both of these territories, foreign helpers are received on a “use and discard” basis that relegates them to the position of being “included-out”: welcomed only to provide the host’s needs yet denied of the prospect of being fully integrated into their social fabric (Yeoh 2004, 9; Erni 2013).
In Hong Kong and Singapore, women from the Philippines and Indonesia form a crucial segment of this underclass of migrant workers; yet both of these groups of migrant women workers are subjected to a range of policies that would guarantee their transience and deprive them of gaining a foothold in Hong Kong and Singapore. They have no access to citizenship, permanent residency, or right of abode, while their passes or visas are regulated by their work contracts. FDWs are usually granted two-year work permits which they can renew for as long as they want until they are 60 years old, subject to approval from these city-states’ immigration departments. Throughout their stay, they are prohibited from bringing their spouses and children with them.
These exclusionary policies affirm how Asian tiger economies like Singapore and Hong Kong operate as “zones of exception” where “migrants become [an] exception to neo-liberal mechanisms and are constructed as excludable populations in transit, shuttled in and out of zones of growth” (Ong 2006, 16). These restrictive mechanisms of receiving and accommodating migrant helpers in both of these host cities’ private and public spaces not only illustrate the conditionality of the hospitality that receiving states extend to their foreign workers but also show how such conditions have negative consequences on FDWs’ everyday lives in the host countries.
In Singapore in particular, aside from FDWs’ lack of access to citizenry and permanent residency, they are also excluded from the legal mechanisms that protect all the other workers in the island-state. Migrant helpers are not covered by the Employment Act that legislates standard employment terms like working hours, minimum pay, paid leave, etc. (Yeoh, Huang, and Devasahayam 2004). It was only in 2013 that the island-state has legislated a weekly day-off rule, but even then, survey estimates that only a third of the total population of foreign maids in the city-state enjoys either once-a-week or once-a-month rest days (Seow 2014). Since there are no standard contract and employment terms, Singapore’s “hands-off” approach only offers advice for hiring locals and recruiters on salary rates, accommodation, adequate food, and safety for FDWs (Ministry of Manpower 2015a). At present, the salary rates of migrant helpers in the country ranges from 310 to 550 SGD (220–400 USD) per month (The Singapore Guide 2015).
Even though FDWs exist outside the legal framework of standard employment in the island-city, they are ironically subjected to surveillance and control from both their host country and their employers. The Singaporean government requires employers to post a security bond of 5,000 SGD (3,600 USD)—aside from the maid levy amounting to 300–450 SGD (220–335 USD) they also have to pay monthly—for each foreign helper they will hire (Ministry of Manpower 2020). The employers stand to lose the bond if they or their hired help violate the job contract. This makes the hiring of foreign helpers particularly expensive and prohibitive for employers, compelling them to protect the money that they have spent by making sure that their foreign maids will not break their contracts or run away from them (Yeoh, Huang, and Gonzalez 2004). These requirements are not just a means for the government to control the demand for live-in maids but also a way of enjoining employers to micro-manage their hired help, from constant monitoring and surveillance to deprivation of day-off.
Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong has drawn rules and regulations concerning employment and living conditions of FDWs under Employment Ordinance. It has set terms in standard employment contracts that state the minimum allowable wage for foreign helpers, which at present is pegged at 4,630 HKD (600 USD) per month, fringe benefits like accommodation, health care, food or food allowances, guaranteed weekly day-off, paid statutory holidays, and annual leave (Ignacio and Mejia 2009). These standards are important because they remain as grounds which migrant women use to claim redress and seek grievance mechanisms when faced with problems with their employers. Moreover, Hong Kong, in 2013, repealed its imposition of 400 HKD (50 USD) monthly levy for employers hiring foreign maids, which started in 2003 because of recession.
However, while Hong Kong’s legal measures are generally seen as more responsive to its migrant helpers, some of its policies mirror exclusionary modes of hospitality similar to those practiced by Singapore. Just like in Singapore, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are bound by their contracts and “conditions of stay.” In cases where they find themselves terminated, they have to go back to their origin countries after a grace period of two weeks (Wee and Sim 2005, 185). The Hong Kong government enforces this “two-week rule” to prevent migrant maids from “job-hopping.” However, these conditions of stay have inhibited migrant maids from leaving abusive employers and seeking legal redress in fear of losing their only source of livelihood, being repatriated with debts, and spending more for another cycle of deployment.
Finally, their vulnerability is heightened by the mandatory live-in arrangement that FDWs in both Hong Kong and Singapore follow (Human Rights Watch 2005). They are placed to inhabit the same space as their bosses, dissolving the spatial and temporal boundaries of work and home throughout their stay as guest workers in both city-states. Because their work is inside their host’s homes, their experience of place is defined by “placelessness” just like their time for work and time for rest becomes indefinite and flexible inside the household (Parreñas 2...
